Late that night, from a chest in the corner of her chamber, she unearths the bird skeleton she took from the king’s bones room. It’s still intact, held together by the king’s handiwork of guts and wire, as light as a reed in her cupped palm. Esther studies it, then turns it over into her other hand and studies it more. She has dismissed the boy with the fan to go stand outside with the guards. She is alone, except for Darius, asleep in his basket—she has an hour, maybe, before his cries will wake the nurse, who sleeps as lightly as a cat behind the closet door.
She stands the bird upon the chest, marveling at its silver feet. If this one works, she thinks, she won’t have to sneak or cajole or seduce her way back to the bones room. She hasn’t been allowed there since her first visit, when she broke the feet off the fox, and the minister has warned her that if she attempts to visit the king again without official invitation, he will have her locked in her chambers from one moon to the next. He traps her in corners. He pretends to whisper in her ear, then licks. Once, under the table at a banquet, he drew the king’s golden scepter—a thing she had never seen the king so much as touch—up under her robes until its tip arrived at her entry point. After that he decided that anytime she was brought before the king, the king had to point the scepter at her before she could approach. And the king now does this. He appears even smaller since Darius was born, as if his son’s strange beauty has diminished him further. He does whatever the minister suggests.
Esther touches a finger to the bird’s beak. It looks oddly long, without eyes or feathers to accompany it. You will talk, she thinks, and almost instantly, she believes she can do it. Enough time has passed. Her magic must be accumulating again. You will.
She works each night, while Darius sleeps. She has no one to guide her now or provide instruction. She must make it up. She must be patient beyond her capacity for patience. She knows the beak must come last so starts with the feet, and one night, a few weeks in, the silver toes begin to quiver. She jumps, forgetting Darius, settles him before the nurse can hear—he likes his stomach patted—then mazes in her mind back to where she began, reconstructing the order of breath and mind that led to the quivering. She tries again. Nothing. But the next night, her energies renewed, the feet again quiver. The next, they turn from silver to bone. The next, a layer of skin grows upon them. In this way, she works her way up the bird. Each time she achieves a new turn, she panics—she will never be able to do it again. There is no formula, no incantation or trick. Only faith and focus. But every night—except when she is kept late at a banquet, or called to the king—she sits with the bird and brings another part of it closer to life.
The wings are not easy. The yellow doesn’t want to come in. She almost gives up. Does it matter if they are yellow? Maybe this is a different kind of bird. But she’s certain it’s not. She keeps going. She must press the point of herself into the bird’s wings with great force yet slowly; she can’t leave a hole. She thinks of her mother whittling one of her needles, working until the tip was so fine she could push it through cloth and watch the cloth close up again behind it. Esther’s task is similar now to the needle’s: she has to enter and disrupt, while leaving the bird intact. She hums, to steady herself. She goes so slowly she isn’t sure she’s moving, and every time she is interrupted by Darius crying—forcing her to dive, eyes closed, onto her bed, the bird hidden inside her robe, readying herself for the nurse’s entrance—she must begin all over again. Sometimes she is too tired. Sometimes she brings Darius into her bed, deciding that this bird business is a kind of madness, vowing to stop. She has this boy. It could be enough. But the next night, always, she begins again. And eventually, at a moment that does not announce itself as any different from the moments that have come before, the yellow blooms.
But the wings are not as difficult as life. She knows the bird contains it. She is more confident about the bird containing life than she was about its wings containing yellow. But how to make it breathe? She presses herself in, but that doesn’t work, then she tries it as a kind of transformation, but that doesn’t work, either. She puts her mouth to the beak and offers her own breath to the bird, but her breath comes back at her, smelling sour. It’s only when she gives up one night, and in giving up loosens her hands around the bird, and in loosening her hands around the bird accidentally spurs it to open, that the bird exhales the breath it’s been holding since it died so that it can receive another. It shivers. Then, without apparent shock or grogginess,
